I figured I’d better get this review of the latest Bad Voltage out before the next one drops this week (sigh).

The episode clocks in at a svelte 51 minutes, and mainly focuses on two segments, one on Pokémon Go and the other on streaming music.

As the guys point out, unless you’ve been living in a cave you have probably heard of Pokémon Go (and even people in caves are playing it). It is the augmented reality (AR) game from Niantic based on the characters made popular by Nintendo.

It has also had its share of controversy, with stories of people being injured while playing and in my own neck of the woods a row over people being fined for visiting the grave of a friend.

The game from Niantic that proceeded it was Ingress, which I’ve talked about before and I showed it to the team when they did their show in Fulda. Ingress can be pretty addictive, so I was set on not playing Pokémon at all. I didn’t really need another time sink in my life.

But a couple of things happened. First, I was introduced to this short from South Park that parodied Pokémon with “Chinpokomon”. I laughed since “chinpoko” is a rude Japanese word, so of course it was one of the few words of Japanese I know. I was determined to be “chinpokomon” on Pokémon Go.

I installed the app the weekend it was released and tried to register with that “trainer” name. It wasn’t to be. I tried every variation I could think of but it wouldn’t accept it. I’m not sure if it was because they were disallowing names with anything like Pokémon in them, or that, by that time, some of the 10 million people who had downloaded it had had the same idea. So I uninstalled the app and forgot about it.

Flash forward a week or so and not only did Andrea start playing, a bunch of people at the office did too, so I decided to check it out again.

I’ll post a full review soon, but I have a few thoughts to share here. Ingress suffers from three main issues: GPS “spoofing” where people fake their location, people playing multiple accounts and the in-game chat system which is often used to heap abuse on other players.

Pokémon Go is much nicer in that there is no chat system and you can’t trade items (making multiple accounts somewhat useless). That may change in the future but for now you can play in a rather friendly environment. Even in battles your Pokémon don’t die, they “faint” and you get them back. There is still an issue with spoofing, which is how many players access the game in countries that don’t have it.

The problem with Pokémon Go is the gameplay gets old, fast. The variety of game items makes it an order of magnitude more complex than Ingress, but I’m not really into collecting a 100% version of each Pokémon. I do like getting new ones (catch them all) but Niantic has made that pretty difficult. There is a part of the screen that will show you nearby Pokémon but you don’t get a clue as to where they are. There was a website called Pokévision that reverse engineered the API and would display them on a map, and I used that extensively to get uniques. I got a lot of exercise running around the UMN campus during Dev-Jam to get one I needed. I was averaging 25,000 steps a day according to my watch, but since Pokévision has been shut down I am less eager to run around in circles hoping a Pokémon will pop up.

In a couple of weeks of casual play I’ve made it to Level 24 and caught 105 Pokémon (I’ve seen 106, damn Wheezing) and my interest is starting to wane (although the Tauros is my favorite, ‘natch). I’ll probably hit Level 25 (where you get access to a new item) and then cut back drastically. Which I think is going to be the major problem with Pokémon Go.

We often eat at this one restaurant in Pittsboro every Friday night, and two weeks ago one young lady who works there was really into the game. This past Friday I asked her how she was doing with it, and she said she’d stopped playing because “it was boring”.

Don’t get me wrong, Niantic has a hit on its hands, I just don’t think they will sustain the level of interest they had a launch.

The guys made some good points about it. Jeremy noted that while it is called “AR” it is really nothing more than taking the video feed from the camera and superimposing Pokémon pictures on it. It does nothing for scale or distance, for example.

Bryan detailed some interesting history that I didn’t know concerning the origin of Niantic. It grew out of a spooky company called Keyhole with designs on tracking and influencing people’s habits (although they are more well known for being the technology behind Google Maps and Google Earth). Now, as an Ingress player I’ve already opted in to allow Google to track my location, and it came in handy when Jeremy roofied me at Oktoberfest and I wandered around Munich for a few hours. I had a record of where I had gone.

On a side note, Bryan went on to state that on Android you can’t control access to the microphone. Now, I’ll agree that the only way to be sure would be to have a hardware kill switch installed so you could disable the microphone entirely, but I run a version of AOSP called OmniROM and I seem to have the choice to limit access to the microphone on a “per app” basis.

Not sure if that isn’t available on all Android releases but it seems to work on mine. Of course, many apps use Google Play Services so there’s that.

The second segment was on streaming music services. I don’t stream music so I don’t really have much to add, but I have heard that Pandora uses OpenNMS so I’m a big fan. (grin)

I do sometimes listen to SiriusXM at my desk. We have it in our cars so I have the option to stream it as well. I was listening to AltNation when I heard a track called “Loud(y)” by Lewis Del Mar. I found it on Soundcloud with a number of other tracks by them, and after it played them all it continued with similar artists. I really liked the mix (which included songs like “Thrill” by CZAR) and ended up listening to it for a couple of days. What I liked most about it is that all of them were from artists new to me. I buy the music I like and so I tend not to get much from streaming, and I also tend to listen when being connected to a network is not feasible (such as in a car or a plane), but I am considering the service from Soundcloud that let’s you listen offline (ironically called Soundcloud Go).

Which brings me to another sore point with me. The guys brought up vinyl. As many people know, vinyl is making a comeback, but dammit, it is just some sort of hipster thing since almost all music today is digitally mastered. You probably haven’t listened to a commercial record that didn’t go through Pro Tools, so when I hear “oh, but vinyl is so much richer and warmer” I have to call bullshit. Get a FLAC version of the song and you can’t get any better. Sure, you may need to upgrade your sound card and your speakers, but when, say, I get a FLAC master track from MC Frontalot it is the one that is sitting on his computer where he created it. It contains all of the information captured, and I can’t see how that gets improved by sticking it on a vinyl record whose sound quality starts to decay the moment you play it for the first time.

(sigh)

The Outro for the episode was kind of cool, as the guys talked about old gadgets and things like BBS’s. I can remember being in Tokyo when the Sharp Zaurus was introduced and I scoured the city looking for one in English. It was a cool device and I also liked the name. And the show brought back memories of having flame wars on a WWIV BBS system over a 2400 baud modem. The host (a high school kid who worked as a bag boy at a grocery store to pay the phone bill) could only afford a single phone line so you had to take turns. It made flame wars kind of fun – once you got in, you’d post your rant, log off, wait 30 minutes and then log back in to see if there was a reply.

All in all a nice, light episode. Nothing too heavy, kind of a like a sorbet. Hoping they bring back the meat this week.

This week the Gang of Four is down to three as Stuart is off on holiday with his daughter in New York City. The episode runs 82 minutes long and I’m seeing a trend that the shorter episodes happen when Jeremy is out. I think it is because he clutters up the whole show with facts and reasoning.

The first segment asked the question “Are we in another tech bubble, and if so, what shape is it?” Of course we are in another tech bubble, as Jeremy so deftly demonstrates by comparing a number of start ups with over a billion dollars in valuation to real companies such as General Electric. They talk about a number of reasons for it, but I think they left an important one out: egos.

Look, growing up as a geek in the late 1970s early 1980s, we didn’t get much respect. Now with the various tech bubbles and widespread adoption of technology by the masses, geeks can at least be wealthy if not popular. But I think we still harbor, deep down, a resentment of the jocks and popular kids that results in problems with self-esteem. Take Marc Andreessen as an example. By most measures he’s successful, but take a look at him. He is not a pretty man, even though that male pattern baldness does suggest a big wee-wee. I think he still has something to prove which is why he dumps money into impossible things like uBeam which has something like a $500MM valuation. I think a lot of the big names in Silicon Valley have such a huge fear of missing out that they drive up valuations on companies without a business model and no hope of making a profit, much less a product.

But then Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2B so what do I know.

Well, I do know the shape of the tech bubble: it’s a pear.

In the next segment the guys almost spooge all over themselves talking about the Pixel C tablet. I’ve never been a tablet guy. I have a six-inch … smart phone and it works fine for all of my mobile stuff. If I need anything bigger, I use a Dell XPS laptop running Mint. I do own a Nexus 10 but only use it to read eBooks that come in PDF format.

But all three of them really like it, meaning that if I decide to get a new tablet I’ll seriously consider it. Bryan did mention a couple of apps I was unfamiliar with, so I’ll have to check them out.

The first is called Termux and it provides a terminal emulator (already got one) but it adds a Linux environment as well. Could be cool. The other is DroidEdit which is a text editor for Android with lots of features, similar to vim or gedit on steroids. Bryan used these during his ill-fated attempt to live in the Linux shell for 30 days.

Apparently the Pixel C is magnetic, with magnets so strong you can hang it on your fridge. Add a webcam and I won’t need one of these.

The third segment was on Nextcloud. I’ll give the Nextcloud guys some props for getting press. This is something like the third in-depth interview I’ve listened to in the past three weeks. If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t know that Nextcloud is a fork of OwnCloud, start here. They interviewed Frank Karlitschek and Jan-Christoph Borchardt about the split and their plans.

I was hoping for more details on what caused the fork (because I’m a nosy bastard) but Jono starting off with something like a 90 second leading question to Frank that pretty much handed him an explanation. I was screaming “Objection! Leading the witness!” but it didn’t help. I guess it really doesn’t matter.

I do think I’d really enjoy meeting Frank. They are dedicated to keeping Nextcloud 100% open source (like good ol’ OpenNMS). They also brought up a point that is very hard to make with large, complex open source projects. Everyone will ask “How do you compare with OwnCloud” when the better question is “How do you compare to Dropbox”? At OpenNMS we are always getting the “How are you different from Nagios” when the better question is “How do you compare to Tivoli or OpenView”?

The fourth segment was on the XPrize Global Learning Project. The main takeaway I got from it was that the very nature of the XPrize doesn’t lend itself to the Open Source Way. The prize amount is so high it doesn’t encourage sharing. Still, a couple of projects are trying it so I wish them all the luck.

The final “segment” is the outro where the guys usually just shoot the breeze. They mentioned Stuart, visiting the US, getting slammed with Brexit questions, and I do find that amusing having traveled to the UK numerous times and been peppered with questions about stupid US politics. It’s one of the reasons I hope Donald Trump doesn’t get elected – I’m not ready to go back to claiming to be Canadian when I travel.

They also talked about fast food restaurants. I’m surprised In-N-Out Burger didn’t get a mention. From the moment a new one opens it is usually slammed at all hours. They did mention Chick-Fil-A, which I used to love until I boycotted them over their political activism. There is a pretty cool article on five incredible fast food chains you shouldn’t eat at (including Chick-Fil-A) and one you should but probably can’t (In-N-Out).

Overall I thought it was a solid show, although it needed more ginger. Good to see the guys getting back into form.

So the Gang of Four decided to actually produce a regular episode of Bad Voltage for the first time in, like, a month, so I decided to resurrect this little column making fun of them.

I am actually supposed to be on vacation this week, but for me vacation means working around the farm. I was working outside when the heat index hit 108.5F so while I was recovering from heat stroke I decided to give this week’s show a listen.

Clocking in at a healthy 75 minutes, give or take, it was an okay show, although the last fifteen minutes kind of wandered (much like most of this review).

The first segment concerned the creation of NextCloud as a fork of OwnCloud. I’ve already presented my thoughts on it from Bryan’s Youtube interview with the founders of NextCloud, and not much new was covered here. But it was a chance for all four of them to discuss it. One of the touted benefits of the new project is the lack of a contributor agreement. I don’t find this a good thing. Note that while I whole heartedly agree that many contributor agreements are evil, that doesn’t make them all evil. Take the OpenNMS contributor agreement. It’s pretty simple, and it protects both the contributor and the project. The most important feature, to me, is that the contributor states that they have a right to contribute the code to the project. I think that’s important, although if it were lacking or the contributor lied, the results would be the same (the infringing code would be removed from the application). It at least makes people think just a bit before sending in code.

Bryan made an offhand mention about trademarks in the same discussion, and I wasn’t sure what he meant by it. Does it mean NextCloud won’t enforce trademarks, or that there is an easy process that allows people to freely use them? I think enforcing trademarks is extremely important for open source companies. Otherwise, someone could take your code, crap all over it, and then ship it out under the same name. At OpenNMS we had issues with this back in 2005 but luckily since then it has been pretty quiet.

While there was even more speculation, no one really knows why the NextCloud fork happened. Some say it was that Frank Karlitschek was friends with Niels Mache of Spreed.me and wanted a partnership, but OwnCloud was against it. I think we’ll never know. Another suggestion that was been made is that it had to deal with the community of OwnCloud vs. the investors. Jono made the statement that VCs don’t take an active role in the community, but I have to disagree. My interactions with 90% of VCs have been an episode of Silicon Valley, and while they may not take an active role, you can expect them to say things like “These features over here will be part of our ‘enterprise’ version and not open, and make sure to hobble the ‘community’ version to drive sales, but other than that, run your community the way you want.”

One new point that was brought up was the business perception of the company. I think everyone who self identifies as an open source fan who is using OwnCloud will most likely switch to NextCloud since that is where the developers went, but will businesses be cautious about investing in NextCloud? The argument can be made that “who knows what will set Frank off next?” and the threat of NextNextCloud might worry some. I am not expecting this to happen (once bitten, twice shy, I bet Frank has learned a lot about what he wants out of his project) but it is a concern.

It is similar to Libreoffice. I don’t know anyone in the open source world using OpenOffice, but it is still huge outside of that world (I did a ride along with a friend who is police and was pleasantly surprised to see him bring up OpenOffice on his patrol car’s laptop).

It kind of reminds me when Google killed Reader and then announced Keep – seemed a bit ironic at the time. If a company can radically change or even remove a service you have come to rely on, will you trust them in the future?

The segment ended with a discussion of the early days of Ubuntu. Bryan made the claim that Ubuntu was made as an easier to use version Debian which Jono vehemently denied. He claimed the goal was to create a free, powerful desktop operating system. All I remember from those days were those kids from the United Colors of Bennetton ads on the covers of the free CDs.

The next piece was Bryan reviewing the latest Dell XPS 13 laptop. My last two laptops have been XPS 13 models and I love them. They ship with Linux (which I want to encourage) and I find they provide a great Linux desktop experience.

I got my newest one last year, and the main issue I’ve had is with the trackpad. Later kernels seem to have addressed most of my problems. I also dumped the Ubuntu 14.04 that shipped with it in exchange for Linux Mint, but I’m still running mainline kernels (4.6 at the moment). I’m eager for Mint 18 to release to see if the (rumoured) 4.4 kernel will work well (they keep backporting device driver changes) but outside of that I’ve had few problems.

Battery life is great, and the HiDPI screen is a big improvement over my old XPS 13. The main weirdness, for my model, is the location of the camera. In order to make the InfinityEdge display, they moved it to the bottom left of the screen so that the top bezel could be as thin as possible. It means people end up looking at the flabby underside of my chin instead of my face at times, but I use it so little that it doesn’t bother me much.

The third segment was about funding open source projects. It’s an eternal question: how do you pay for developers to work on free software? The guys didn’t really address it, focusing for the most part on programs that would provide some compensation for, say, travel to a conference, versus paying someone enough to make their mortgage. Stuart finally brought up that point but no real answers were offered.

The last fifteen minutes was the gang just shooting the breeze. Bryan used the term “duck fart” which apparently is a cocktail (sounds nasty, so don’t expect it on the cocktail blog). There is also, apparently, a science fiction novel called Bad Voltage that is not supposed to be that great, and the suggestion was made that the four of them should write their own version, but in the form of an “exquisite corpse” (my term, not theirs) where each would right their section independently and see what happens when it gets combined.

All in all, not a horrible show but not great, either. It is nice to have them all back together.

I’m eager to see how Bryan manages the next one, since he is spending 30 days solely in the Linux shell. How will Google Hangouts (which is what they use to make the show) work?

Curious minds want to know.

It’s a new year, and that means a new Bad Voltage.

Let’s hope the Intro is not an indication of things to come. Worst … intro … ever. Seriously, just jump to the 3 minute mark. You’ll be glad you did.

Okay, brand new year and that means predictions, where I predict that Jeremy will once again win. Yes, his entries aren’t all that strong, but he always wins.

The way the game works is that each member of the BV team must make two predictions, with bonus predictions available as well.

Jeremy’s Predictions:

• This is the year that some sort of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Virtual Reality (VR) device goes mainstream. I’m not sure if Mycroft or Echo counts as an AI device, but after playing with the Samsung Gear VR I made the prediction that VR would really take off this year. He specifically stated that the device in question would not be the Oculus Rift.
• Apple will have a down year, meaning that gross revenues will be lower this year than in 2015. Hrm, I’ve been thinking this might happen but I’m not sure this is the year. In the show they brought up the prospect of Apple making a television, and if that happens I would expect enough fans to rush out and buy it that Apple’s revenues would increase considerably. But without a new product line, I think there is a good chance this could happen.
• Bonus: a device with a bendable display will become popular. There are devices out there with bendable displays, but nothing much outside of CES. We’ll see.

Bryan’s Predictions:

• Canonical pulls out of the phone/tablet business. While the Ubuntu phone hasn’t been a huge success, it is the vehicle for exploring the idea of turning a handset-sized device into the only computer you use (i.e. you connect it up to a keyboard and screen to make a “desktop”). I can’t really see Shuttleworth giving this up, but in a mobile market that is pretty much owned by Apple and Android, this probably makes good business sense.
• In a repeat from last year, Bryan predicts that ChromeOS will run Android apps natively, i.e. any app you can get from the Google Play store will run on Chrome without any special tricks. Is the second time the charm?
• Bonus: Wayland will not ship as the default replacement for X on any major distro. Probably a safe bet.

Jono’s Predictions:

• The VR Project Morpheus on Playstation will be more popular than Oculus Rift. Another VR prediction, and it is hard to argue with his logic. Sony already has a large user base with its Playstation 4 console, and if this product can actually make it to market with a decent price point, you can expect a lot of adoption. Contrast that to the Oculus Rift, whose user base is still unknown, plus an estimated price tag of US$600 and the need for a high end graphics computer, and Morpheus has a strong chance to own the market. Making it to market and the overall user experience will still determine if this is a winner or a dud.
• Part of Canonical will be sold off. Considering that Canonical has a number of branches, from its mobile division, the desktop and the cloud, the company might be stretched a little thin to focus on all of them. Plus, Shuttleworth has been bank-rolling this endeavor for awhile now and he may want to cash some of it out. Moving the cloud part of the company to separate entity makes the most sense, but I’m not feeling that this will happen this year.
• Bonus: a crowdfunding campaign will pass US$200MM. The current record crowdfunding campaign is for the video game Star Citizen, which has passed US$100MM, so Jono is betting that something will come along that is twice as successful. As I’ve started to sour on crowdfunding, as have others I know, it would have to be something pretty spectacular.

Stuart’s Predictions:

• People will stop carrying cash. Well, duh. It is rare that I have more than a couple of dollars on me at any time. Now, this is different when I travel, but around town I pay for everything with a credit card. I get the one bill every month and I can track my purchases. Heck, even my favorite BBQ joint takes cards now (despite what Google says). Not sure how they will score this one.
• Microsoft will open source the Microsoft Edge browser. Hrm – Microsoft has been embracing open source more and more lately, so this isn’t out of the realm of possibility. If I were a betting man I’d bet against it, but it could happen.
• Bonus: he was going to originally bet that Canonical would get out of the phone business, but since Bryan beat him to it he went with smaller phones would outsell larger phones in 2016. It’s going to be hard to measure, but he gets this right if phones 5 inches and smaller move more units than phones bigger than that. I don’t know – I love my Nexus 6 and I think once you get used to a larger phone it is hard to go back, but we’ll see.

The gang seemed pretty much in agreement this year. No one joined me in the prediction that a large “cloud” vendor would have a significant security issue, but both Jono and Jeremy mentioned VR.

The next segment was on a product called the “Coin“. This is a device that is supposed to replace all of the credit cards in your wallet. Intriguing, but it has one serious flaw – it doesn’t work everywhere. If you can’t be sure it will work, then you end up having to carry some spare cards, and that defeats the whole purpose. Coin’s website “onlycoin.com” seems to imply that Coin is the only thing you need, but even they admit there are problems.

It also doesn’t seem to support some of the newer technologies, such as “Chip and PIN” (which isn’t exactly new). This means that Coin is probably dead on arrival. Jeremy brought up a competitor called Plastc, but that product isn’t out yet, so the fact that Coin is shipping gives it an advantage.

I don’t carry that many cards to begin with, so I have little interest in this. I’d rather see NFC pay technologies take off since I usually have my phone with me. I need more help with my “rewards” cards such as for grocery stores, and there are already apps for that, like Stocard. I don’t see either of these things taking off, but I give the edge to Plastc over Coin.

Note: Stocard is pretty awesome. It is dead easy to add cards and they have an Android Wear integration so I don’t even need to take the phone out of my pocket.

The last segment was an interview with Jorge Castro (the guy from Canonical’s Juju project and not the actor from Lost). Juju is an “orchestration” application, and while focused on the Cloud I can’t help but group it with Chef, Puppet and Ansible (a friend of mine who used to work on Juju just moved to Ansible). Chef has “recipes” and Juju has “charms”.

I don’t do this level of system administration (we are leaning toward using Ansible at OpenNMS just ’cause I love Red Hat) thus much of the discussion was lost on me (lost, get it?). I couldn’t help but think of my favorite naming scheme, however, which comes from the now defunct Sorcerer Linux distribution. In it, software packages were called “spells” and you would install applications using the command “cast”. The repository of all the software packages was called the “grimoire”.

Awesome.

The show closed with a reminder that the next BV would be Live Voltage at the SCaLE conference. I’ve seen these guys get wound up in front of 50 people, so I can’t imagine what will happen in front of nearly 1000 people. They have lots of prizes to give away as well, so be there. I can’t make it but I hope there is a live stream and a Twitter feed like the last Live Voltage show so I can at least follow along. I can’t promise it will be good, but I can promise it will be memorable.

So, overall not a great show but not bad. I don’t like the title, and if you listen to the Outro you might agree with me that “Huge Bag Full of Nickels” would have been a better one.

The last Bad Voltage of 2015 is a long one. Bryan is out sick, which is surprising since he only misses the shows with which I’m involved, so I guess he was really sick this time.

Since the first BV episode of the year includes predictions, the last one of the year is used to measure how well the guys did, and this was the topic of the first part of the program.

Aq predicted that mobile phone payments via NFC (such as Apple Pay and Android Pay) would increase greatly. They did, but by more than an order of magnitude than the amount he predicted. I’m not sure why he didn’t get credit for this one since he was correct, he just missed a zero at the end. He also predicted that Steam game consoles would be a big success. One of the issues with measuring these predictions is that it is hard to get verifiable numbers, but they all agreed that had Steam shipped a million consoles they would have mentioned it.

His “extry credit” prediction was that Canonical would get bought. They didn’t, so Aq didn’t do so well overall.

Then they moved on to Jono. He predicted there would be a large migration away from traditional sources of video, such as cable television and satellite, to streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu. This was again hard to verify (remember the quote that there are lies, damned lies and statistics). I think one of the reasons is that, especially in the case of cable, the vendors bundle so much together that it is usually cheaper to get television included as part of a package instead of just going Internet-only. Considering how many people talk about shows that are only available via streaming services and how clients for those services are now ubiquitous in televisions, it seems to be a safe bet that people are spending more of their time watching those services, at the cost of traditional shows, but it is very hard to measure with any level of objectivity.

Speaking of televisions, Jono also predicted a surge in 4K televisions to the point that they would be available for $500 or less. I haven’t seen it. The content is just not there yet, and while, yes, you can buy a 4K TV on Amazon for less than US$500, no one who really cared about the quality of that picture would buy one. The best 4K TV recommended by Wirecutter is still nearly US$1600.

So I don’t think he should get credit for that one.

His extra prediction was a large increase in “connected homes”. This was vague enough to be impossible to measure, but with products like those from Nest becoming more popular, it seems inevitable. I think there was definitely a jump in 2015, but then again going from nearly zero to only a handful would still be a huge increase, percentage-wise. I think it will be some time before a majority of homes in the US are “connected” in an Internet of Things fashion.

Jeremy’s predictions were next. He predicted that laptop and desktop computer sales would actually go up after years of decline, and while the rate of decline slowed, this was a miss.

The guys gave him his second one, which was that wireless charging for portable devices would become the norm (with a notable exception in Apple). While I’m charging my Nexus 6 right now on a TYLT charger, the latest generation of Nexus phones do not support wireless charging, and with the introduction of USB-C and “fast charging” I think wireless charging has peaked. Still, he got credit for it, so I think Aq should get credit for his mobile payments prediction.

Jeremy had two bonus predictions. One was that the markets would both see a peak in the NASDAQ index (which happened) as well as a correction of more than 10% (which also happened). His prediction of an Uber IPO did not happen, however.

Bryan wasn’t around to defend his predictions, but in the first case it was the opposite of Aq’s prediction that Steam consoles would be a huge success with the prediction that they would ship zero units. That didn’t happen, of course.

He also predicted that Ubuntu phone sales would be minor compared to other “open source” handset units such as those from Jolla. While no one would claim the Ubuntu phone was a runaway success, from what can be guessed from various sales figures, it seems to have sold about as well as the options.

Finally, his bonus prediction would be that ChromeOS would be able to run all Android apps natively. That, too, didn’t happen. It would have been interesting to hear his analysis of his performance, but he was pretty blunt in that he totally expected to lose.

So, Jeremy wins.

The second segment was a bit heady even for these guys. It concerns an announcement by the Linux Foundation to promote the creation of “block chain” tools.

Now, I kind of think I have my brain around block chains, but don’t expect me to explain them. It was invented as part of the bitcoin protocol, and it is a type of ledger database that can confirm transactions and resist tampering. This can be useful, since it provides a very distributed and public way of running a list of transactions, but there is not requirement that the block chains themselves be made public.

The idea is that we could promote this for use in, say, banking, and it could both improve speed and reliability.

I’m not sure it made a great topic for the show, however. This is esoteric stuff, and for once there were a lot of pregnant pauses in the discussion. I think the overall consensus was that this is a Good Thing™ but that in practical use the data won’t be very open.

The next segment was a review of the Titan USB cable – a hardened USB cable to resist damage. While not bad for a last minute substitution since Bryan was unavailable to do his originally scheduled review, I thought the discussion went on way too long on an already long show. TL;DR: – break a lot of USB cables? You might want to check this out. No? Don’t worry about it.

While the cable part of the Titan is well protected, the connector ends, a common source for failure, aren’t much different from a normal cable. Considering the cost, if you only damage a cable occasionally, it probably isn’t worth it to get a Titan.

At least it wasn’t about that $500 gold HDMI cable. The thing I love about digital is that it pretty much works or doesn’t work. I used to agonize over analog speaker cable, but cable quality is considerably less important in a purely digital realm.

The final segment concerned an apparent conflict of interest around the Linux Foundation’s role in the lawsuit involving the Software Freedom Conservancy and VMware concerning GPL violations. There are a lot of corporate interests involved with the Linux Foundation, and the general question asks if the Foundation is more concerned with protecting those interests than software freedom?

My own experience with GPL enforcement is that it is a shit job. Many people think that if the software is “free” they should be able to do whatever they want to with it, and so they don’t understand the problem when some third party decides to commercialize your hard work.

Next, discovery is a pain. If you can see the code, it is somewhat easy to determine if it was the same or different as another piece of code, but the problem with GPL enforcement is usually the code in question is closed. Discovery costs a lot of money as well, and money is not something a lot of open source projects have in abundance.

Finally, even if you have a case, getting a judge that can understand the nuances of the issue is harder still. Without such an understanding, it is both hard to win the case as well as to get damages. Even if you succeed, the remedy might just mean open sourcing part of the infringing code with no monetary damages.

When you look at it, pursuing a GPL violation is a thankless job that most projects can’t even consider. But it is incredibly important to the future of free software that those who create it have the power to determine under what conditions their work can be used. It is why we donate to the Software Free Conservancy. They are fighting the good fight, in very much a David and Goliath scenario, for the rights of everyone involved with free software. There are not many people up to that task.

For example, it appears that the car manufacturer Tesla is in violation of the GPL. Telsa is popular and well funded. There are very few people, especially those in the technology industry, who wouldn’t want to own a Tesla. So, do you want to sue them? First, they will bury you in legal procedures that will drain what little funds you have. Next, people will be mad at you for “attacking” such a cool company. Third, your chance for success is slim.

Now I don’t have any experience with the Linux Foundation. I don’t know anyone there and I’ve never been to their conferences. I think they can play an important role in acting as a bridge between traditional corporations and the free and open source software community. It seems to me that they are at a crossroads, however. If they allow large companies like VMWare to control the message, then they will eventually become just another irrelevant mouthpiece for the commercial software industry. Yes, that stand may cost them contributions in the near term, but if they truly want to represent this wonderful environment that has grown up around Linux, they have to do it.

I just went and looked up the compensation of the officers of the Linux Foundation. This is an organization with income around US$23MM per year (in 2014). The Executive Director makes about US$500K per year, the COO a little more than that, and there are a number of people making north of US$200K. In fact, of the roughly US$7.5MM salary expense, a third of that went to eight people. Considering that much of the Linux Foundation income comes from corporate donations, I think these eight would have a strong incentive to act in a way to protect those donations, even at the expense of Linux and open source as a whole.

Let’s compare that to the Software Freedom Conservancy. For the same time period they had about US$868K in total revenue, so about 1/30th of that of the Linux Foundation. They only have one listed employee, Bradley Kuhn, with a reasonable salary of US$91K a year (with total compensation a little north of US$110K).

Who would you trust with defending your rights concerning free software? Eight people who together make more than US$2.5MM a year from corporate sponsors or one guy who makes US$100K?

It’s funny, I wasn’t very upset about this segment when I listened to it, but now that I’m investigating it more, it is starting to piss me off. I expect someone in the Valley to defend those high salaries for the Linux Foundation as part of doing business in that area, so I looked up a similar organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. Twice as large as the Linux Foundation, their Executive Director makes around US$200K/year.

Grrr.

I’m going to stop now since I’ll probably write something I’ll regret. For full disclosure I want to state that I’ve known Bradley Kuhn for several years, and even though we tend to disagree on almost everything, I consider him a friend. I also know that Karen Sandler has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy in a paid role in 2015, so their salary expenses will go up, but I’d bet my life that she isn’t making US$500K/year. Finally, remember that if you shop at Amazon be sure to go to smile.amazon.com and you can choose a charity to get a small portion of your purchase donated to them. I send mine to, you guessed it, the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Getting back to Bad Voltage, the show ended with a reminder that the “best Live Voltage show ever” will happen at the end of the month at the Southern California Linux Expo conference in Pasadena. You should be there.

Since the next show will be about predictions for 2016, I’m going to throw my two into the ring.

First, a well known cloud service will experience a large security breach that will make national headlines. I won’t point out possible targets for fear of getting sued, but it has to happen eventually and I pick this to be the year.

Second, by Christmas, consumer virtual reality will be the “it” gift. We’re not there yet, but I got to play with a Samsung Gear VR headset over the holidays and I was impressed. It is a more polished version of Google Cardboard although still based on a phone, and it is developed by Oculus, the current leaders in this type of technology.

While the resolution isn’t great yet, the potential is staggering. I watched demos that included a “fly along” with the Blue Angels, and although the resolution reminded me of early editions of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, it was cool if not a little nauseating.

There was a Myst-like game called “Lands End” that was also enjoyable, although once again the low resolution detracted from the experience.

Then I played Anshar Wars. It was a near perfect VR experience. A first-person space shooter, you fly around and dogfight with the bad guys while dodging asteroids and picking up power-ups. No headaches, no complaints about resolution, it was something I could have played for hours. Note that it helped to be in a swivel chair ’cause you swing around a lot.

So those are my predictions. Since I doubt I’ll have the stamina to keep up with these posts, I’ll probably never revisit them, but the chance will improve if I’m right.

A bit more navel-gazing than normal, the latest Bad Voltage clocks in at nearly 90 minutes. Whew.

It was nice that Jeremy was back, and I found it hilarious that in the past two weeks he hadn’t bothered to listen to the show he missed. Considering the fact that that show was one of the shortest of the year, I guess we know who is doing all the talking. Or, as Jono points out, Jeremy is the one who clutters up everything with facts. I thought Aq’s audio was a bit off at the beginning (it sounded like he was down a well) but it seemed to get better as the show progressed.

The first segment concerned the failure of open source mobile projects like FireOS and Jolla. I thought this bit ran long, but there were some gems to be had. Bryan was talking about running Linux on tiny mobile devices for which he was mercilessly teased, but I had to agree with him. While I would never want to be forced to run LibreOffice exclusively on a device the size of my Nexus 6, sometimes it would be nice to be able to do quick edits on the go. I hate using ssh on my handy, but when I need it, I need it.

Jono points out that a lot of people tie their personal identity to their mobile devices. A lot of the way people interact with each other these days is through SMS, Facebook and Instagram, and the constant use of an iPhone or an Android phone can cause people to get very attached to them. Any new challenger to the iOS/Android juggernaut has to not only support those apps, they have to overcome the fact that people (to some degree myself included) have strong ties to their technology choices. Unlike how OpenStack disrupted the nascent cloud market, it seems to be hard for open source projects to do the same in the mobile arena, and I had to laugh when Aq suggested replacing “disrupt” with “f*ck up”.

It was pointed out that if companies like Microsoft who can throw tens of billions of dollars at a market can only garner a little over 2% market share, it is doubtful that a new open source project would have better success.

On a side note, I just spend a few days up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and the client liked to use Surface Pro tablets. I got to see them in action, and they are pretty amazing – for many they could be a laptop replacement just like the ads suggest. But I doubt that Microsoft is going to dent iPad sales just because of the brand Apple has built. Often it is not the superior technology that wins.

The second segment was a review of a couple of security cameras that Jeremy was trying out: the Arlo by Netgear and the Guardian DCS-2630L by D-link.

I have a couple of cameras at my place, although I don’t have the budget of these guys. Inside buildings I have the D-Link (DCS-5010L) which is a great little camera. It does pan and tilt and works in low light conditions. Since it wouldn’t do well outside, I have the Agasio A602W which is no longer available.

Why neither of them are totally wireless (i.e. you have to plug them in) they are both supported via open source tools like Zoneminder, although with the purchase of my Synology box I just use the Surveillance Station app that comes with that. It can continuously record, record only when motion is detected, etc., and you can set how much video to store per camera. I really dislike the thought of video from my house going “to the cloud” so I love the fact that I can control where it goes, and Synology has a mobile app that lets me access the video whenever I want it (plus, my DSL upstream would suck for constantly uploading video). The Arlo does seem to be compatible with the Surveillance Station, so as Jeremy’s pick I might have to try one out.

[UPDATE: WCCFTech is full of crap amd the Arlo is not compatible with the Surveillance Station]

One last comment from Aq brings up a coming issue with the Internet of Things. All of these toys should play nice together, but often they don’t. He calls it “IoT lockout” but I like “Internet of Silos” (i.e. Z-Wave vs. ZigBee). I do like how most of these cameras have a web interfaces where the video stream can be accessed by a URL, which means third party tools can access and integrate with them, but I can expect vendors to start locking stuff like that down to force people into their own particular cloud infrastructure.

The third segment concerned the “Luna Ring” – an idea started a few years ago by a Japanese engineering firm to ring the moon with solar panels and beam the energy back to Earth via microwave and lasers. I did laugh out loud at Jono’s comment that the name sounds like a contraceptive device.

Odd names aside, I think this is both a cool idea and one that will never happen. The guys point out some of the obvious flaws, but I can’t help but think of the resistance the world would have to high powered beams of light focused on points on the Earth. Sounds like something a James Bond villain would think up.

I did get embarrassed for my home state when it was brought up that the town of Woodland, NC, recently voted down zoning for a solar farm. The click-bait reason given was that one citizen pointed out that solar farms would “suck up all the energy from the sun”.

(sigh)

The actual story is a little more involved. There are already three solar farms in the area surrounding a local substation, so the town is obviously not anti-solar. Small towns like Woodland are getting hit hard with the decline of manufacturing, so I can see the residents there being frightened and looking for a scapegoat. Still, I had to be embarrassed by some of the comments, and it is obvious our educational system needs some work (but that’s a totally different topic).

One person commented that the solar panels were killing the plants. That reminded me of a project my friend Lyle produced called “solar double-cropping“.

As I write this, it is over 72F (22C) on Christmas Eve, the hottest Christmas Eve on record. Our climate is changing and plants that used to thrive are having issues. The idea of solar double-cropping is to use shade from solar panels to help those plants while generating electricity.

And yes, they came up with it in North Carolina.

The final segment was a “year in review”. The guys lamented the lack of innovation, but there were some good things, too. As a “freetard” (someone who runs open source software almost exclusively) I had to agree with Aq that those of us who feel this way are having to compromise less and less as the open source options get better (although I still have to tease him about the compromise he made for his closed source One Plus X phone).

We saw high definitions pictures of Pluto. I’m still amazed that nine years ago, we as a civilization chucked a bunch of metal up into space and it managed to rendezvous with a planetoid without major issues. We lobbed another piece of metal at a comet, and while not as successful it was still quite a feat.

In entertainment, the amazing Mr. Robot television series offered us a portrayal of hacking that wasn’t totally made up.

Speaking of entertainment, the show closed with a reminder that Live Voltage will be happening at next month’s SCaLE conference. If you can, you should go, and they are still accepting ideas for “upSCALE” talks. From their latest e-mail:

UpSCALE Talks: There is still room for an UpSCALE Talk or two – UpSCALE Talks are held in the style of Ignite presentations offered at various O’Reilly-sponsored events where participants are given five minutes with 20 automatically-advancing slides. Those interested in submitting an UpSCALE Talk can submit through the SCALE CFP system – https://www.socallinuxexpo.org scale/14x/cfp – and mark your talk with the UpSCALE tag.

So that’s it for 2015. I’m off to put on some shorts and sunscreen. ♫ Oh the weather outside is frightful … ♫

I started writing these “inverter” posts because many Bad Voltage episodes would raise topics that I felt deserved commentary. By the middle segment in this episode I was screaming at the computer.

So, good show.

First, whoever decided on the cover art gets some points. It references a groaner of a pun Jono makes that gets dropped in the Intro.

Second, also in the intro, we learn that Jeremy Garcia will not be on the show due to jury duty of all things. While I’ve always considered Jeremy one of the calmer and more reasoned members of the team, since this show clocks in at scant 52 minutes maybe he’s the one who drags things out. They did stumble a bit on the whole “… and now, Bad Voltage” line so I do look forward to Jeremy’s return.

Okay, the first segment concerns the “new” economy of begging. It kind of focuses on what we would call “crowdfunding“, but as Stuart points out, crowdfunding usually means that you get something in return. However, with sites like “GoFundMe” the term has been expanded to include outright begging, as in “Dear Internet, help, can you spare a dollar for a sandwich”. A quick perusal of the site with a search in my local area brings up a number of articles ranging from a person who was defrauded by a builder, to two women who want to go to the ACC tournament, to another woman who needs help finishing her Ph.D.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing, as the sucker/minute ratio remains high, but it is a bit different from crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter where the donors have a non-zero expectation of actually getting something. That is more along the lines of “new economy” than asking strangers to pay for your vacation.

So, let’s talk about those programs. I have to admit I don’t participate in them. Before you go and call me a cheapskate and a leech, I do donate a lot of money to local and free software causes, but I just don’t do it via these programs. I’ve participated in exactly two Indiegogo campaigns and one Kickstarter campaign. Let’s see how they went.

The first time was the Indiegogo campaign for the Ubuntu phone. While I am perfectly happy with my Android phone (more on that later) I support open source efforts and this seemed like a good thing. They were organized and they had realistic expectations for what it would cost. The campaign fell well short of their goal and my money was returned. All in all, I’m okay with that.

The next time was also on Indiegogo. It was for the Angel Sensor wearable health device. I have a keen interest in how my body is behaving as metrics are the key to making successful improvements. The problem is I don’t want to be sending my activity and sleep pattern information to some third party like Fitbit or Jawbone. I was very eager for an open source solution.

I’m still waiting.

Plagued by production problems and lack of communication, I have no idea if I’ll ever see the device on which I spent US$178. The one person I knew there is on “a well deserved leave”. Furthermore, I’m not sure if they are releasing the server and client code as open source, which I what I was lead to believe was the plan. Finally, the first app they wrote for it is for the iPhone of all things, which makes me think that their dedication to open source is a bit lacking. At this point in time I’ve written the whole thing off.

When the Mycroft project did the crowdfunding thing, I was sorely tempted to buy in, but my experience with Angel has made me cautious. I think a lot of technology-based projects severely underestimate what is needed to be successful. They aim low and then trumpet when their stretch goals are met, only to wake up later to the fact that it is going to be a lot harder to deliver than they thought, like the hangover after a big bender.

Please note that I’m not saying this will happen with Mycroft, I wish them all the luck in the world, it’s just that I’ll shell out a few extra ducats for the finished thing when it arrives rather than gamble.

Does anyone remember Diaspora? It was the open source, distributed Facebook. I thought the project was dead, but it is apparently still around, although the pressure of delivering on it is blamed for the suicide of one of the co-founders. Diaspora was one of the most successful Kickstarter projects at the time.

This isn’t to say that these things always fail. The “Exploding Kittens” project was phenomenal and while I haven’t played it I’ve given it as a gift and people say it is a lot of fun. This is where I think crowdfunding can shine – in creative projects where the sponsors have a huge amount of control over the product. I’ve heard of a number of successful movie, music and video projects that were crowdfunded without problems.

Which brings me to my one foray into Kickstarter. I’m a huge fan of the band De La Soul. To me they were the first nerdcore hip-hop group. When hip-hop seemed solely focused on “bitches ‘n hos,” De La Soul was delivering thoughtful, fun and energetic music. When they announced their Kickstarter for a new album, I signed up and ordered the album to be digitally delivered on a 1GB Posdnuos USB drive set for September delivery.

Well, it ain’t here. (grin)

I really don’t mind – I’d rather the album ship when it is ready (probably next Spring) than for them to release crap on time but I’m basically 0-3 on the whole crowdfunding thing.

I was thinking about this when the second segment started with Aq reviewing his new One Plus X (OPX) phone, giving it a 9 out of 10.

This is when I started yelling.

See, while I have zero experience with the OPX I bought a One Plus One (OPO) and I found One Plus to be one of the most horrible companies on the planet.

I was first introduced to the OPO by some friends in Germany. Here was a powerful phone in an attractive package at a reasonable price. It also ran open source software in the form of a version of Cyanogenmod, a packaged instance of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Finally, it was relatively inexpensive. Too good to be true?

It was.

They have an “invite” system in order to even buy the phone, but I managed to wrangle one. While I thought the phone was too big initially, I got used to it and soon I was telling everyone how great it was, just like Stuart does in his review.

But then things started to go sour. The upper half of the digitizer started acting up and so I opened a ticket with support. This is when One Plus started to lie and cheat, trying to wrangle out of the fact that they had a hardware problem. The problem has one topic on their forums that had 125 pages of posts before they closed it, and another that is at 305 pages as I write this. That’s 305 pages of pure horror stories.

So when I say lie, we all know that One Plus is a tiny Chinese firm, yet all of my support replies came from “different” people with traditionally English female names, like Kathy, Leah and Jessa. I think this was a tactic to make us more sympathetic to them since they knew they were going to provide crappy support.

When I say cheat, they refused to honor warranty support and kept asking me to perform a number of increasingly complex tasks culminating in disassembling my phone. When I refused, fearing I would damage it, they refused service, even when I offered to send it to them at my expense.

In my mind, One Plus is pure scum and no one should buy their products. I came extremely close to launching a class action lawsuit against them before I decided I had better things to do than to sue a company that won’t be around in five years.

Seriously, if I had to choose solely between an iPhone and a One Plus phone I’d grab the iPhone so fast I’d break my fingers. Finally, their new OxygenOS is closed source so you are up the same creek as if you had bought a Samsung or other closed Android phone.

So I’m screaming at the computer because I know Aq’s “9 out of 10” review will move people to consider buying one. Don’t! Aq has hooked up with the same skank that did me wrong, and while part of me wishes them well, I know it will end in misery.

But what are the options, you might ask. Samsung is expensive and closed, Google is getting more and more closed, and so perhaps One Plus is the least of the evils.

There are options, but Stuart’s will be pretty limited since he seems to have two huge prejudices. First, he expresses disdain for hold people who root their phones. This is odd, since I don’t think he’d have any issue with buying a laptop that shipped with Windows and putting Linux on it, and this is, after all, a podcast about things hackable. Second, he seems to dislike anyone with a “big” phone.

I love the alternative ROM crowd. These are the true AOSP disciples, and my favorite ROM is OmniROM. I love OmniROM so much that when I need a new phone I work backwards. I start with the list of officially supported OmniROM devices and make my choice from there. While I closely identify with the philosophy behind OmniROM (it was started as a fork from Cyanogenmod when they got tons of VC money and went evil), what I love are the options. You can choose just how many or how few applications you want from the Google ecosystem, which allows you to easily limit what to want to share (note that this is available with almost any alternative ROM), and they turn on a lot of things Google doesn’t, such as “shake to dismiss” in the alarm.

As for size, when I unpacked my OPO I thought the thing was huge. I was using an HTC One and it seemed tiny in comparison. It took me about two days to get used to it. When I replaced the OPO because they are huge douches (or whatever is Chinese for douche) I went with the Nexus 6. Now that is a huge phone, and I’m sure Aq will belittle it.

Know what? After about two days of using it, it felt normal. I love my Nexus 6 running OmniROM. The large screen allowed me to retire my Nexus 7 since I can comfortably watch videos on it when traveling. It has an amazing camera, is extremely fast and gets all the latest Android shiny. In fact, I was amazed that when the new Nexus phones came out I found myself asking myself why in the world would I switch? Plus the Nexus 6 still has wireless charging, which I’ve become used to.

I think Aq’s size issues stem from the fact that everyone thinks that if someone is using a phone bigger than the one they use, those people are crazy. If he spent a week with a Nexus 6, I’m sure his mind would change. Now, he’s given up freedom for a pretty face with a cheap price tag.

Now it seems like I’m picking on Stuart a lot, but I don’t mean to be mean. I love the guy and I want him to be happy, but that little tramp will only bring misery. Mark my words.

If One Plus did you wrong, let him know, but I think it is too late. As with every doomed relationship, when you are in it you can’t see it coming.

Whew.

After the first two, the last segment was pretty conflict free. It concerns the US Department of Justice wanting to force Apple to unlock a phone. I thought this case raised a couple of interesting points.

First the reason they want to force Apple to do it instead of the owner is to avoid the issues of self-incrimination. I never really thought about that before, but it is good to know.

Second, the DoJ is using the logic that since Apple still owns the software on the phone, they should be able to unlock it. Most people (well, non-software people) don’t know or realize that they don’t own most of the software they use. They have just been granted a right to use it. Now Apple (and Google) are taking steps to encrypt phones so even they can’t unlock them. This case involved an older iPhone, but it does make the case for using free software and kudos to Apple for fighting the order.

While there may be a fine line as far as “ownership” is concerned, free and open source software is much more in the hands of the user (you don’t pay for it) so you may have additional protections against self-incrimination when you use it. I am not a lawyer, but it is fun to think about.

The show ended with a reminder that the next Live Voltage show will be at SCaLE in January. I also learned why Bryan missed our little post-show gathering last year – he went to bed.

And here I thought he hated me.

Throw out the first segment, and this is one of the best Bad Voltage episodes yet.

It’s not that the first segment sucks (well, for certain values of “suck”), but it pales in comparison to the rest of the show.

That first bit concerns a rant, introduced by Aq, about a trend in programming to rely on “frameworks” instead of actually learning how to code in a particular language. It was set off, as I understand it, by someone wanting to know how to add together two numbers using JQuery, and the response was, uh, why don’t you just add the numbers together using Javascript?

I can understand the frustration. There was a recent rant by Linus Torvalds about a pull request submitted against the kernel that was unnecessarily obtuse. As the pressure mounts to get more and more code out faster and faster, not only are novice programmers being asked to do more complex tasks, they are relying more and more on frameworks and libraries to do them.

While I am not a coder, I do view the writing of code as an art form, and I like code that is artistic: beautiful, clever and functional. I can remember many years ago visiting an especially ugly page on a government website, and when I looked at the source I found it had been generated by Microsoft Frontpage. Yes, that tool would create a web page, but in no way will the code be beautiful or clever, or in this case, functional.

I was not sure if this rant applied to IDEs. Almost all OpenNMS code is done in Eclipse. I think I’m the only one who uses vi, along with healthy amounts of recursive grep. We also use a lot of libraries. Why reinvent the wheel? Of course, this has caused the size of the OpenNMS application to balloon, currently pushing more than half a gigabyte. But space is relatively cheap and time matters, so why not?

I thought it very telling when Aq decided he disliked code that involved any level of abstraction above what he was using. It reminded me of the old George Carlin joke that anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac, while anyone who drives slower than you is an idiot. I did like it when they reminisced about classic code that was very compact and just plain fast. These days we trade speed of completion for speed of execution. My own memory is of running Mac OS 6 on one double sided (800K) floppy. I could put the O/S, MacPaint, MacDraw and MacWrite all on one disk will about 100K left for my files. I couldn’t afford a Mac back then (they ran about US$5K) but the school had ones you could use and all I needed to carry was that disk.

The next segment talked about the Blue Yeti microphone. I bought one of these specifically for the time I was on Bad Voltage, so there must be something in the water about this show and owning one. I was a little confused, however, when the segment starts and Jono states he bought his as a travel mic. This sucker is huge, and as I like to travel as light as possible I can’t imagine dragging it around. However, as the segment continues, it is obvious we are talking about the same mic.

It is a great device. While I like getting input from the gang on which toys to buy, my go-to source for tech advice is The Wirecutter, and the Yeti is their microphone of choice as well. If you plan on recording for the Internet, you should seriously consider getting one of these.

It is the third segment that I thought was brilliant. I’m not sure who came up with the idea, but the discussion centered around ethics programming in self-driving cars. While I disagree with Jeremy that this is something that will need to be figured out before these vehicles become mainstream, it will be a question in need of an answer as they mature.

The scenario offered is this: You are in your self-driving car going along a mountain road. Suddenly, you turn a corner and there are five people in the way. Assuming the car can detect this, should it continue on, protecting the passenger but possibly killing the five people, or should it drive over the side of the cliff, killing the passenger but saving the people in the road?

Wow – what a neat question.

I have no idea of the correct answer. It did dawn on me (as it did the gang) that if the solution was to sacrifice the passenger that pranksters would be more than happy to jump in front of these cars just to see what happens, and I think in at least those models aimed at higher end consumers, they may tout that passenger safety has been programmed into the system to be paramount.

It was a real “grown up” question and I think spawned one of the better discussions ever done on the show.

I was surprised no one brought up Spock’s death speech, “The needs of the many, outweigh … (the needs of the few) … or the one” but Aq did reference the I, Robot movie so he gets points for that.

The final segment concerned the UK government’s decision to put pressure on technology providers to eschew strong encryption in favor of either weak encryption or some sort of back door. Apple has stood up and stated that, if enforced, they would stop selling their products in the UK. It was scary to think about this, since no elected official in any company would want to be labeled as the guy who stood in the way of someone getting an iPhone. Bryan pointed out that the market capitalization of Apple is roughly US$700B, putting it at about 25% of the UK’s GDP (with its fifth highest GDP in the world), and so that threat carries a lot of weight.

This was another “big boy question” and I liked the discussion. Should anyone announce that a back door exists in a popular technology, you can bet the bad guys will throw everything at exploiting it. It’s just not a good idea, although it isn’t surprising that it comes from the UK, a country known for the ubiquitous use of CCTV (on a side note, they have also started using traffic cameras that track you between points and if you exceed the posted speed between them, you get ticketed.)

Of course, there is the thought that a private company like Apple has the ability to sway governments, but no one minds the 800 pound gorilla when it is on your side.

During the outro the guys announced they are returning to SCaLE next year to do a Live Voltage show. These are awesome and shouldn’t be missed, and they have room for nearly 1000 people in the venue so expect it to be crazy. Plus, if you visit the site you’ll see Bryan Lunduke right on the front page next to Cory Doctorow – which I think is pretty cool. Outside of Live Voltage, he’ll be doing a presentation on why he hates freedom, I mean, why Linux sucks.

While we aren’t sponsoring that show, OpenNMS is a gold sponsor at the conference, so be sure to go and stop by our booth.

Anyway, the lads did a great job this week. If you have never listened to Bad Voltage, this would be a great one with which to start.

Okay, so I’ve been slack at getting this review out, since by now they’ve already had the planning meeting for next week’s show. As they mention at the start of this one, both Jeremy and Jono were unavailable for the last planning meeting so Stuart and Bryan ran with it. It was a good show, but it kind of demonstrates that, like many of us, the guys are very busy and sometimes you just have to soldier on, which I think is a great set up for the quality of this blog post.

I’ve been traveling a lot and I’m about to head out again, in part, to attend two great open source conferences in Europe, but last week found me in Rochester, NY which was an easy drive to Buffalo, where I met up with a recovering Jeremy Garcia.

Due to my fascination with classic cocktails, we ended up at Buffalo Proper, where it turns out they make great drinks. This was right after the taping of the show, so I heard a bit about it from Jeremy and then listened to it on the plane ride back home.

The first segment talks about all the new cool open source computing devices out there, and if they are just for über geeks or will they ever appeal to the masses. I love reading about all the new toys that are available, but unfortunately I’m so busy that I can’t ever find time to play with them. I bought a Raspberry Pi when it first came out, but after it sat on a shelf for six months I gave it away to someone who might actually have time to use it. It took me forever to get around to making an OpenElec/Kodi PVR and without a specific need it is hard for me to find time to just play. I think these things will become more popular, but it will take time as young people (who tend to have more free time) discover them and start coming up with ways to use them.

Think about Lego. When they just made generic sets of bricks, they were a well known company but not very large. Then they started making sets to build specific things, and the brand took off. We’re are the “generic brick” stage now, but I expect something to come along that will create a huge increase in what things you do with these devices.

I am often jealous of today’s youth. Back when I was in school we didn’t have the Internet, per se, but we did have access to a number of dial up services. I used to call into BBS systems a lot (mainly running WWIV) and even figured out how to dial in to the campus network and access the VAX (which was connected to the Internet). There I could use “talk” to communicate with friends. Now, kids today have access to orders of magnitude more information and more toys. Unfortunately, that comes with the risk of “cyber-bullying” and other problems, but still, for those so motivated the benefits outweigh those risks.

I was surprised they didn’t talk about the ruling by the Librarian of Congress that made it (more) legal to tinker with technology you buy, which I think is a great step toward opening up tinkering at all levels.

The next segment discussed “vigilante malware” which uses the same exploits as regular malware but does it in order to make things less vulnerable to attack. Is this a good thing? The guys all agreeded that having someone change things on your devices with out your permission was “bad”, but they differed on the level of bad. I take a different approach. I work hard to keep my equipment up to date, so my assumption is that I wouldn’t be affected. However, many geeks and most muggles aren’t so aggressive, and so they get owned. This results in things like my mailbox being hit by spam (I get around 150 spam messages a day – most caught and processed by our mail server). This wouldn’t happen if people were more careful, as most spam originates from infected PCs, so I’m all for vigilante malware. Think about it – malware isn’t going away so why not encourage more of the good kind? Think of it like “good” vs. “bad” cholesterol. The only real solution to both is better security practices and better code, and both types of malware are incentives.

I think there is a hole in my logic somewhere. It’s kind of like the joke that you should always take a bomb onto a plane. Because while the chance of there being a bomb on a plane is slim, the chance of there being *two* bombs …

Anyway, the third segment talked about the Owncloud application. I’ve been meaning to play with this for some time (see “no time to play” above) as it looks cool. Take all of the nice features of “cloudy” things like Dropbox, and put them on a server you control. I think this is a fine goal. Plus, Owncloud also includes calendaring and contact management (apparently). We currently use Sogo for that, but it would be neat to integrate that with other things.

The only thing that wasn’t clear to me was the business model. The founder Frank Karlitschek states that Owncloud is not “open core” (or as we like to call it “fauxpensource“) but I’m not clear on their “enterprise” vs. “community” features. My gut tells me that they are on the side of good. I can see having a different license for an “enterprise” feature such as Sharepoint integration, especially if Owncloud has to use a proprietary library in order to get it to work at all, and it doesn’t look like the “server” version is intentionally hamstrung in order to get more business. Only finding the time to play with it will let me know for sure.

The final segment concerned laws about open source. The thesis is that the open source community spends a lot of effort working against laws that limit open source, so why shouldn’t the proprietary software world have to fight against laws that would make open source the norm? From the example above, the Software Freedom Conservancy spent a lot of effort to get the Librarian of Congress to make an exception to allow you to examine the software in various devices you own – why shouldn’t other companies have to fight to keep their code closed?

I think the team got this one right – money. Proprietary software companies get an immediate financial gain when their lobbying efforts pay off, but it doesn’t work for free software. However, I am seeing in these days of cost cutting that there is a movement in some governments to promote open source, so I think it is more of a question of true education than lobbying. One of the issues is that it gets confusing when companies like Owncloud offer an “enterprise” version and it isn’t clear what that means. While it might be 99% open source, all a detractor has to do is say “look, Senator, you have to pay just like you do for our stuff, and you know our stuff”.

Overall, decent episode. I get a mention in the outro as Jono refers to Todd Lewis, one of the people behind the All Things Open conference, as the “Nicest Man in Open Source”. I once held that title, but I would happily cede it to Todd. He is a truly nice guy, and is always willing to give you a hug. I used hug too, until that time I hugged Jono in Munich and what happened next had to be explained to my therapist with dolls.

For this episode, the Bad Voltage team returns to normal with a taped show clocking in at just over an hour. I really enjoyed this one and it made me remember why I started this little column in the first place. Most of the time they bring up stuff for which I have strong opinions, and these posts let me express my thoughts in some depth. Plus, my three readers don’t seem to mind, if they read them at all (grin).

So, if you haven’t listened to it already, please do so now. I’ll wait.

The first segment focuses on the Volkswagen software scandal where, as Jeremy put it, code was added that basically said “if under test, then lie”. I even came up with a joke about this while in Germany. How many VW engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? Forty, unless the emissions inspector is watching, then it is only one.

I had three main thoughts about this topic. The first concerns the US VW CEO Michael Horn, who blamed the whole thing on rogue engineers. Unlike the overall CEO (I found reference to a “North American” CEO, too, how many CEOs does this company have?) Martin Winterkorn who resigned, Horn is obviously taking the coward’s way out and looking to blame anyone but himself. It seems a little fishy – one would think that all the major engineering decisions would be made in Germany, so had Horn testified to that effect instead of trying to shift blame I would have been a little more comfortable with his testimony, but now it seems like he is trying to hide something, which would suggest he knew about the issue. Winterkorn stated “I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group” which seems to indicate it was too large to just be confined to one or two “rogue” engineers, casting even more doubt on Horn’s account. But since Horn lives in the US of A it is doubtful anything will happened to him, and even if it did he could always find a high paying job in the financial industry. (sigh)

The second thing that bothers me is that this kind of cheating would not be possible if the code for the cars was open source. Heck, the DMCA specifically prohibits “anti-circumvention” which has been interpreted to mean that attempts to reverse engineer proprietary code are illegal, so even attempting to figure out what they are doing could land you in jail. With growing demonstrations of huge security issues in automobile software something needs to be done about it, and of course I’d like to see things become more open. I have been thinking about selling my car, a 2004, but one thing that has kept me from doing it is the thought all of the possible software holes in new vehicles.

Finally, as someone who once owned a 2002 Jetta TDI, part of the diesel ownership experience is the idea that you are helping the environment. I can run biodiesel in it, perhaps from recycled cooking grease, and the overall pollution equation is supposed to be close to that of a hybrid (when you consider the environmental damage used to make the batteries) or an electric car (the majority of electricity in the US is from coal, so add that to the damage caused by mining rare earths). To find that you have been lied to and are actually a huge polluter is quite a blow, and it is the one thing VW won’t be able to easily fix.

One of my team owns a later model TDI and I am very interested to see what happens. My guess is that a software-only fix will simply dumb the power curve down to the point where the car is unusable (and modern diesels can be quite peppy). Think about it: using Jeremy’s “if-then” analogy above, “set test=true” and bam, you pass emissions. Probably makes the car run like crap or they would have done it from the start, but that is an extremely easy software fix. My prediction is that it will take a class-action to get VW to address the problem properly, which will ultimately involve a car “buy back” program.

Anyway, I’m sure the guys will revisit this in the near future and I look forward to hearing more of their thoughts.

The next segment talked about a portable desktop/laptop thing from System 76 called a Serval Workstation. This is a monster device, weighing nearly nine pounds without the charging brick in the 17-inch form factor, that is meant to be a laptop that acts as a high performance desktop.

Several years ago I became tired of lugging even my small laptop around, and so I found a deal on Woot for a decent desktop and bought two of them. I added a couple of nice monitors and now I have one at home and one at the office. With everything I need being accessible from the network, I really didn’t see the need for a laptop (of course, I have one for when I travel).

I thought Aq hit it on the head when he mentioned all of the stuff you have to get for a desktop: keyboard, mouse, camera, speakers, etc., that just comes with a laptop. I especially like the built in UPS – as someone who lives in a rural area they are a must for the frequent power fluctuations. Laptops just come with them. Thus the appeal of this device is to create a portable desktop that is easy to move, trading size and battery life for power.

Also, I really like System 76. I tend to vote with my wallet, and when we needed to replace some aging iMacs I bought a bunch of Sable machines from them and we haven’t been disappointed. They “just work” with Linux, and they are both reasonably priced and pretty sharp looking as well.

The one thing I wish the guys had talked about is the anemic 1080p resolution. I hate the fact that so many laptop manufactures seem content with such a limited pixel density. Sure, 1080p on a 12-inch screen is fine, but on a 17-inch monster? My desktop monitors have a much higher resolution, and my latest laptop, the Dell XPS “sputnik” has even higher density. The HiDPI screen has caused some issues, so that could be one reason that System 76 opted for a lower density, but still it would be nice to have a HiDPI solution that just worked.

My final comment on this is that they are actually wrong when it was stated that the Dell Ubuntu version requires patches that must be installed via a Dell repository. I don’t run the Dell repos on my machine as most of the changes have been ported upstream and there was nothing in the repos I actually needed. Yes, it didn’t work out of the box – it shipped with Ubuntu 14.04 but I am running Ubuntu Gnome 15.04 with a 4.1 experimental kernel to address some of the more irritating bugs, but with 15.10 coming out in a week I am very eager to play with an O/S with the 4.2 kernel delivered as standard.

The third segment was on the idea of a “delayed public license” where code would be initially published under a proprietary license but at some predefined point it would convert to an open source license. While I appreciate the idea behind it, this is not a licensing issue that requires a new license. We really don’t need any more open source licenses. Instead, you could just publish it under a proprietary license with the terms that “on such and such a date” the license would become something else.

The idea is that a lot software has a limited shelf life, and once the immediate revenue opportunities have been exploited, there isn’t much need to keep software closed. Thus a small team of developers could monetize their work yet still add an open source angle to it. This isn’t a new idea, as mentioned in the show id software does this with a lot of its technology. First they opened their Doom engine, and a few years later they opened their Quake engine. Easy peasy.

My suggestion would be to promote this behavior versus coming up with a new license. Also, while I like the thought of putting the code up on something like Github on day one with a proprietary license so that it would be out there when the time came to open source it, I would recommended heavily against this line of action. We have been through a number of cases where people have appropriated OpenNMS code in spite of the license, and the discovery process can be quite expensive if not cost prohibitive. Since this method of starting out proprietary and moving to open source was aimed at small development teams, do yourselves a favor and just hide the code until you are ready to open it. It will work out better in the end.

There were a couple of bits at the end of the show. Jono did a quick “Hack Voltage” segment letting people know that many mobile carriers have the ability to turn e-mails into SMS texts. For example, if you are on AT&T, sending an e-mail to your number “@txt.att.net” will result in an SMS to your phone. We’ve used this a lot in OpenNMS (there is even a field called “pagerEmail” for the address assigned to each user) and it was nice to learn about the addresses for other popular providers. Note that if you have a need to send actual SMS messages (say, if your e-mail server or network is down) you can get an inexpensive device that will let you do it for the price of a SIM card.

They closed the show with a nice long “thank you” to us for hosting the Live Voltage show in Fulda. I was quite touched and I bet the rest of the team were as well, and I look forward to the next “hinted at” live outing of the Fab Four.